Religion and science not compatible. /obvious day

While trust in science remained stable among people who self-identified as moderates and liberals in the United States between 1974 and 2010, trust in science fell among self-identified conservatives by more than 25 percent during the same period, according to new research from Gordon Gauchat, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

Color me not surprised. As science progresses it continues render beliefs like a young universe, someone rising from the dead, someone walking on water, and similar beliefs more embarrassing than they already are.

Science is based on reality, and it’s no secret how the passionately devout tend to react when nagging trivialities like reality encroach on their beliefs. That’s why…

In addition to examining how the relationship between political ideology and trust in science changed over almost 40 years, Gauchat also explored how other social and demographic characteristics—including frequency of church attendance—related to trust in science over that same period. Gauchat found that, while trust in science declined between 1974 and 2010 among those who frequently attended church, there was no statistically significant group-specific change in trust in science over that period among any of the other social or demographic factors he examined, including gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

That’s because none of those other things are hostile to science. One can be male or female without offending the conclusions of science. However, in order to maintain the absurdities of religion, in order to think faith is anywhere near the successful arbiter of truth as experiment, it is necessary to eschew the fiction-gutting machinery of science.

Oh sure, believers still drive cars. They still use computers and enjoy the bountiful food and clean water provided through scientific innovation. But when science determines, without qualification, that nature produces order all by itself or that people don’t actually rise from the dead (as if that conclusion needed science to confirm it), all of a sudden science can’t be trusted.

To these people, science must be the greatest coup in history – just laying low, unraveling the mysteries of the universe and providing us with every luxury for the last several thousand years only so that now it can corrupt believers with its lies.

And this goes to you religious moderates too. If you think someone rose from the dead, you have chosen religion over science. That idea is simply incompatible with reality as science has revealed it. You are at odds with the same force that has made us the rulers of this planet; human intelligence as applied through science.